Sir Chris Hoy is Britain’s most illustrious Olympian and the country’s best
advertisement for mass participation in sport. The story starts, improbably,
in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

“There’s people like my great uncle. He didn’t go on to be an Olympian but he was a world-class mile runner who came back from being a prisoner of the Japanese not the same as when he went out there,” Hoy begins. “Then he started an athletics club in Carnoustie and inspired people to get into sport. He’s lived the life he’s had - an amazing life - because of sport, and he’s taken a lot of his enjoyment from seeing other people enjoy it too.”

Two days after he collected a sixth Olympic gold and wept on the medal podium, Hoy’s eyes were still red as he spoke to Telegraph Sport about the epiphany and its aftermath. “I put everything I possibly had into it. It drained me hugely,” he said. But the pace of the Olympics narrative was already forcing him on to speak about school sport, the 2014 Commonwealth Games and Dave Brailsford’s future at British Cycling.

The subtext to our conversation on the roof of a London hotel was the need to maintain the momentum of the past fortnight, in schools and at grassroots level. Hoy is no proselytiser but has a history of involvement with the Lloyds TSB National School Sport Week. Cycling, he maintains, has already removed the gap between Olympic sport and kids venturing into a velodrome for the first time.

“Cycling can be expensive but it doesn’t have to be. In Manchester the sessions are booked out from 8am to 10pm seven days a week,” he says. “Not many other sports have this. There’ll be school groups coming on from 1pm to 2pm - kids having their first go ever on a track, as part of their PR lesson - then they get off their bikes and the Olympic cycling team get on straight after them.

“That’s normal to us. In other sports it probably doesn’t happen that way. They’ve just been on the track themselves and then they get to watch us for 15 minutes and appreciate what it’s all about.

“I think it costs about £10 to hire the bike for an hour. You get a bike, helmet, shoes and a coach to run the session. Ten pounds isn’t cheap for an hour, but if you get to do that once a week for an hour you don’t have to spend thousands of pounds on a bike. You can do it on a shoestring budget by joining a club and coming down to free events.

“There are velodromes now in Glasgow, Newport, Manchester and London. Geographically, you see within an hour’s travel how many people that reaches out to. And obviously people riding on the streets and on BMX.”

Hoy’s tenacity, longevity and charm would qualify him as his own GCSE subject. “It’s about making sport part of your life and realising the benefits it can give you,” he says. “For social reasons, for fun, for fitness, for your health.”

In his own life he is in that shadowland between national adoration, the come-down period and the void of the future, which he may fill one day in a tracksuit role. “Coaching is something I’d be very motivated by, but when you actually look at what they do, they’re as committed as the athletes, possibly even more so. They’ll be there almost all the time, seven days a week.

“They travel to every race. I wouldn’t travel to all the World Cups – but obviously the coaches go to all the tournaments. So they probably spend more time out of the country than the athletes. It’s a huge commitment. It’s almost what I’m looking to step back from. So coaching is not something for the near future but it is something that would be very rewarding to do.”

The suggestion that Dave Brailsford, British Cycling’s mastermind, will vacate the velodrome to concentrate on Team Sky’s road-racing odyssey could point to Hoy’s immediate elevation to supremo, but he believes Brailsford will stay on: “There’s no sign he is going to leave. Not that I’m aware of, anyway. He’s done a great job of having this amazing success with Team Sky and the GB cycling team. I hope they want to keep hold of Dave and that he wants to stay.” If the worst does come to pass, Hoy is sure GB Cycling will not implode.

“He’s a huge personality and he’s been instrumental in everything that’s happened. He set it up so well. The team doesn’t quite run itself - that would be disrespectful to what Dave does - but he’s appointed so many fantastic people in the positions underneath him. It’s almost as if he’s got it up and running and can hand it across if he wants to. There are a lot of people working in the background who don’t get the credit they deserve. We are so fortunate as riders to have these people above us, making sure we don’t have to worry about anything except riding bikes.”

At the heart of Hoy’s great career was not only a scorching urge to win but also a more complex refusal to lose: an inability to countenance surrender. His nod suggests he agrees: “It’s almost a desire to do yourself and your coaches and everyone that’s helped you justice. You reflect just before your race on what you’ve gone through to get here. You’re not willing, having made all those sacrifices, to let it disappear.

“You’re not willing to be overawed by it, or feel fear. If you get beaten you get beaten and you accept it. It’s not like I haven’t been beaten in my career. I’ve been beaten many times. In the keirin [on Tuesday night], whether I won or lost I just wasn’t going to back off. I saw him [the German, Max Levy] coming past with a hundred metres to go and I thought, ‘It’s everything you’ve got’.

“It’s not conscious thought. It’s instinctive. It’s, ‘I’m not going to shift here. I’m not going to lose my line’. If he’d got ahead of me he could have come down on top and it would have been all over. So the determination was to keep the line, hold him and get that inside advantage on the bend. It was quite a last 100 metres.”

Visual impressions were correct. Hoy, 36, was more shattered than at any time in his Olympic journey. He says: “When I sat down afterwards it was so hot in there. This time round before the medal ceremony they made us wear tracksuits on the podium. So you put on these tracksuits that aren’t very breathable. And it hits you, what you’ve just achieved. The relief that it’s worked out and the delight that it’s worked out, but suddenly you’re physically and emotionally drained.”

With all this pouring out, the idea of two more years’ hard labour sounds impossible. Of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow he says: “If everything works out I’d love to be there. It’s more about whether I can do it, not whether I want to; physically, whether I’m able to train on at this level for two years, at this intensity. I wouldn’t want to just be there to get the T-shirt. I’d want to be going there to compete.” He knows no other way.

Lloyds TSB National School Sport Week is using the inspiration of London 2012 to encourage school sport participation across the UK, www.lloydstsb.com/london2012